Nathan Kernan’s ”Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler”

Kate Wolf speaks with Nathan Kernan about his new biography, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. It’s an intimate look at the great poet who was born in 1923 and would become one of the original members of the so-called New York School along with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Barbra Guest. With the restraint, precision and wry humor of one of Schuyler’s own poems, Kernan’s biography delves into Schuyler’s tumultuous upbringing in the midwest and Washington DC, his early years in 1940s New York City where he became close with and worked as the secretary to the poet W.H. Auden, his fateful meeting of Ashbery and O’Hara, which led to the composition of his first poems, and his many struggles with mental illness.  A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his collection, The Morning of the Poem, Schuyler’s decades of instability began to ease only by his later years, but the lucid observation and “inspired utterance” of his work remained a constant throughout his life.